Adventurous Santa Cruz family’s plane trip ends with crash just after takeoff; all four dead

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A small passenger plane crashed into Watsonville Community Hospital on Thursday night killing the two people on board. (Jason Hoppin/Sentinel)

A small passenger plane crashed into Watsonville Community Hospital on Thursday night killing the two people on board. (Jason Hoppin/Sentinel)

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The wreckage of a small plane sticks out of the side of Watsonville Community Hospital on Thursday, July 7, 2011. The plane was trying to land at Watsonville Municipal Airport. (John Williams/Sentinel)

WATSONVILLE — Federal investigators on Friday raised the death toll in the plane crash into the medical offices at Watsonville Community Hospital, with a Santa Cruz family of four killed shortly after takeoff from a nearby airport.

Officials have not released the names of the victims, but the family and the plane’s co-owner identified the dead as David Houghton, 45, his wife, Dede, 44, and their sons Luke, 12, and Ryan, 10. They were flying to a family reunion near Yosemite National Park when the single-engine plane crashed Thursday night.

“My brother and family died in a plane crash on the way to a family vacation at Pine Lake Mountain last night,” David’s brother, John Houghton, confirmed in a statement.

Initially, officials thought there were just two people aboard, but when they pulled the wreckage from the building early on Friday morning they discovered two more bodies.

National Transportation Safety Board officials are taking the lead in the investigation into Thursday night’s crash, which occurred just before 7:30 p.m. Witnesses described a plane in obvious distress that crashed into a parking lot at Watsonville Community Hospital and slid into a medical office building, where it burst into flames. An NTSB spokesman said the investigation will include an examination of the wreckage, as well as compiling witness statements. Similar investigations typically take six months to a year to conclude.

On Friday, David Ghilarducci — who attended UC Santa Cruz with Houghton and worked with him as a firefighter at the university — came to the crash site to pay his respects.

Ghilarducci, who lives in San Jose, said Houghton worked in environmental and geologic services, but that his passion was scuba diving. He said Houghton ran a small scuba shop that barely broke even.

He added that Houghton enjoyed trips to Baja California so much that he built a house there and sent his two sons to elementary school in Mexico for a year.

Ghilarducci said Houghton took up flying about 18 months ago, and had flown to Mexico more than once.

He had “a lot of interests, a real zest for life,” Ghilarducci said.

In 2009, the Houghtons flew to Mulege, Mexico, to help the town’s residents after Hurricane Jimena. The Houghtons and their sons began collecting donations of cash and laptop computers the day after the storm hit. They flew to Ensenada, where they used the donated money to buy food and medical supplies, and continued on to Mulege, where they distributed the supplies.

The plane that is registered to Houghton is a 1974 single-engine Mooney M20F.

Rayvon Williams, a project manager for the city working on airport issues, said he’d been flying out of the municipal airstrip since 1998. While there have been crashes over the years, Williams said he doesn’t know of one that’s ever occurred near the hospital.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Williams, who in December will take over as interim airport general manager when Don French retires. Watsonville Municipal Airport does not require a flight plan to be filed and has no control tower.

“The city, the airport, we’re all saddened by this,” Williams said. “Our condolences go out to the family.”

The isn’t the first crash of a plane from the airport. In 2006, the pilot of a Grumman AA-5 nose-dived into the front yard of a home on Loma Prieta Avenue across the street from the airport. The pilot suffered minor injuries; no one on the ground was hurt.

The pilot of a single-engine plane was killed in 2009 after he crashed into an apple orchard about a mile east of the airport while trying to make an emergency landing.

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